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ACM in the News 2009

Fewer High School Students Taking Computer Science ClassesThe Washington Post, December 21, 2009"Computing is fueling countless advances, from improving communications and advancing health care to protecting national security and improving energy efficiency to helping understand the depths of the universe," ACM CEO John R. White said.

New Programs Aim to Lure Young into Digital JobsThe New York Times, December 21, 2009Educators and technologists say two things need to change: the image of computing work, and computer science education in high schools. Teacher groups, professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery and the National Science Foundation are pushing for these changes, but so are major technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Intel.

Computing Our Children's FutureThe Huffington Post, December 11, 2009Computer Science Education Week, led by ACM and other partners, demonstrates that the hopes and dreams of our future leaders will not be realized by simply knowing how to turn on a computer, but by turning kids on to computer science. The computing community, including industry leaders, is spotlighting the connection between computer science education and success in a digital world.

A Week to Focus on Computer Science EducationRedOrbit, December 10, 2009To understand why organizations such as ACM and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are supporting CSED week, it helps to understand just how neglected the subject is in American schools. Computer Science Education Week should be a wake up call to revamp computer science education at the K-12 level.

Marietta students blend destruction, funAtlanta Journal Constitution, December 10, 2009"If you've ever used a computer, there are times you just really want to smash it," said Dave Hood, president of the ACM student chapter at Southern Polytechnic State University, the sponsor of a first-of-its-kind event meant to help tech students relieve stress before finals next week.

IBM Achieves Accurate Brain SimulationEE Times, November 30, 2009IBM's paper on the project, called "The Cat is Out of the Bag" was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize at the recent Supercomputer 2009 conference.

Why Aren't More Techies Women?Sacramento Bee, November 29, 2009A recent study released by ACM shows that high school girls, now as ever, do not consider the world of 1s and 0s a sterling choice for their futures. Professionals in the field need to encourage young women like the ones in the ACM study to change their minds.

Breaking the Botnet CodeTechnology Review, November 11, 2009In a paper presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, researchers at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University show how automatic reverse engineering can decipher the structure and purpose of the communications between a command-and-control server and its bots, which are networks of compromised computers controlled by a central server.

Distinguished Computer Scientist and 1996 Turing Recipient Succumbs Dr. Dobbs Journal, November 5, 2009NYU Professor Amir Pnueli was the recipient of the 1996 ACM Alan M. Turing Award, the highest distinction that can be bestowed on a computer scientist, for his pioneering work in verification, the process of formally proving that systems, such as computer hardware and software, behave as intended by their designers.

Study: No Shortage of U.S. EngineersBusiness Week, October 28, 2009"The trends in computer science aren't consistent with the broader trends [identified] in this data," says Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Assn "We have severe problems in our pipeline at every step of the process."

Targeted Attacks Possible in the Cloud, Researchers WarnCIO, October 28, 2009In a report to be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Chicago Nov.9-13, researchers at MIT and UCSD show how vulnerabilities in cloud infrastructures could allow attackers to locate and eavesdrop on targeted virtual machines (VMs) anywhere in the cloud.

Looking for Online Privacy in the CloudsU.S. News and World Report, October 15, 2009Duke University professor Landon Cox proposed three possible options for protecting privacy on social networks in a presentation at ACM SIGCOMM in Barcelona in August 2009.

Solving the P-NP Puzzler Has ConsequencesThe New York Times, October 7, 2009”I don’t think we’ve ever had an article that started off with this kind of a bang,” said Moshe Y. Vardi, a Rice University computer scientist, who is editor in chief of ACM's flagship publication Communications of the ACM, about the record-breaking popularity of the P vs. NP article.

ACM Announces Plans to Serve European Computing Community with World-Class ResourcesConnectWorld, October 1, 2009ACM President Professor Dame Wendy Hall said "We want to discover the work and welcome the talent from all corners of the computing arena so that we are better positioned to appreciate the key issues and challenges within Europe’s academic, research, and professional computing communities and respond accordingly."

Tracking the Life and Death of NewsU.S. News, September 14, 2009ACM-Infosys Foundation Award recipient Jon Kleinberg reported that "The movement of news to the Internet makes it possible to quantify something that was otherwise very hard to measure—the temporal dynamics of the news." The presentation on his current was at the ACM SIGKDD conference in June.

British Prime Minister Apologizes for Treatment of Gay Mathematician Alan TuringAOL news, September 11, 2009Turing's insights "continue to drive innovation and produce unimaginable advances in science and technology that have made the world a better place," said ACM President Professor Dame Wendy Hall. Computer science's most prestigious honor, bestowed annually by ACM, is named the A. M. Turing Award.

10 Great Web Sites:Communications of the ACMMedia Business, September 11, 2009"In the past, we would publish static content in print, PDF or HTML form; so, having the ability for people to interact online on a real-time basis was very important," ACM Media Group Publisher Scott Delman said.

Computer Science Courses Show Steep DeclineT-H-E Journal, September 9, 2009"The continuing drop in students taking AP CS is a serious warning sign about the state of computing in this country," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of CSTA, which ACM launched in 2005.

MIT Sloan Professor Cofounds Journal on Data and Information QualityForbes, August 10, 2009The first issue of the quarterly ACM Journal on Data and Information Quality (JDIQ), co-founded and co-edited by MIT's Stuart Madnick, was published last month and -- as a "first" for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) -- is available for free through 2009 in ACM's Digital Library.

Computing Luminaries Receive NSF Grant to Develop Modeling Tools for Complex SystemsDr. Dobb's Journal, August 19, 2009A multidisciplinary team led by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Edmund M. Clarke, the 2007 co-winner of ACM's Turing Award, has received a five-year, $10 million grant from NSF's Expeditions in Computing program to create revolutionary computational tools that will advance science on a broad array of fronts, from discovering new cancer treatments to designing safer aircraft.

ACM Honors Pioneer in Search TechniquesDr. Dobb's Journal, August 6, 2009For her innovative contributions to information indexing and retrieval systems that have widely impacted the quality of search from the desktop to the Web, the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) has recognized Susan T. Dumais of Microsoft Research with the 2009 Gerald Salton Award.

New Intel SDK Aids Media Application DevelopersE-WEEK, August 6, 2009Intel announces a new software development kit (SDK) for media application development at the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Conference.

SIGGRAPH Faces German CompetitionVariety, July 31, 2009Siggraph and government-funded German event FMX are attracting some of the same sponsors and participants. Still, FMX has a few things to prove.

European Research Consortium Has Celebrated Its 20th AnniversaryCordis Wire, July 20, 2009ACM President Hall presented plans to create a European chapter of ACM. She also discussed the new discipline known as ‘Web Science’, the main concern of the Web Science Research Initiative that she recently founded with Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner.

Study Measures the Chatter of the News CycleThe New York Times, July 12, 2009In a story on a Cornell University study that Internet experts say is the first time the Web has been used to track — and try to measure — the news cycle, the process by which information becomes news, competes for attention and fades, ACM-Infosys Foundation Award winner Jon Kleinberg said his team "see(s) this research as using a rich data set as a step toward understanding why certain points of view and story lines win out, and others don’t.”

When Robots Invaded the SenateNational Science Foundation, July 14, 2009The National Science Foundation (NSF) presented a luncheon briefing, provided in part by ACM, for Senate members and their staff on cyber-physical systems (CPS), an emerging technological field that incorporates computing power to improve virtually every facet of modern life.

Computing Association Swayed by Open Source for New SiteCrain's BtoB, May 28, 2009ACM Group Publisher Scott Delman said that open source enabled the new Communications of the ACM Web site designers to tap into a large community of software developers who are constantly upgrading the systems and adding new features, easily saving about 25% over the long term compared to a proprietary system.

The Obama Administration's Silence on PrivacyThe New York Times Bits Blog, June 2, 2009At the ACM-sponsored Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, Ohio State law professor Peter Swire said one reason it might be difficult for the administration to find its voice on privacy is that there is a split between the typical view of privacy among technology experts and the emerging view of people brought up in the social networking, Web 2.0 world

Top Journals in Computer ScienceTimes Higher Education Supplement, May 14, 2009Communications of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Graphics among top ranked computer science journals by Thomson Reuters’ Essential Science Indicators database covering the period January 1998 through December 2008, ranked by citations per paper to reveal weighted impact.

Obama budget has $148 billion for researchFederal Computer Week, May 18, 2009On May 12, the House of Representatives passed the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Act of 2009, endorsed by ACM, which promotes partnerships between the federal government, academia and industry to foster technology transfer, and creates a task force for cybersecurity R&D.

Computer Science Needs More Good WomenRedOrbit, March 31, 2009When the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Barbara Liskov the prestigious Turing Award earlier this month, their decision and timing were perfect--Liskov is a true pioneer in her field and March is National Women's History Month.

Computer Science Classes Get Their Groove BackSeattle Post-Intelligencer, March 26, 2009To raise awareness about computer science, Microsoft works with other companies as well as large technology associations such as the Association for Computing Machinery, The National Center for Women and Information Technology and the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Woman Computing Pioneeer Wins PrizeSan Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2009"Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of [Liskov's] research," said MIT Provost L. Rafael Reif. The Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of computing, is underwritten by Google and Intel.

MIT Professor Wins $250,000 Turing Award Boston Globe, March 10, 2009Barbara Liskov, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, won the $250,000 Turing Award, one of the most prestigious honors in computing, for helping to make computer programs more reliable, secure and easy to use.

Barbara Liskov Wins Turing AwardDoctor Dobb's Journal, March 10, 2009Liskov has won ACM's Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages. Liskov's achievements underpin virtually every modern computing-related convenience in people's daily lives.

CACM Reports: How to Inspire, Recruit, and Retain Women for Computer Science Careers TradingMarkets.com, February 19, 2009While women's representation in the computing field has improved in some sectors, it is still far short of equal. Communications of the ACM assesses the progress of women in the field over the last 15 years, and presents successful strategies and promising initiatives to increase women's participation.

ACM Urges Obama to Include CS in K-12 CoreSlashdot, January 8, 2009In response to ACM's recommendations to the new administration, the writer initiates a lively dialogue with this question:"Is CS such a basic subject, at the level of science or math, that it makes sense to (try to) teach its principles to every elementary school child?"

Arise Dame Wendy HallComputerWeekly, January 5, 2009ACM's president,honoured for services to science and technology, helped to set up the Web Science Research Initiative in 2006, which is pioneering the new discipline of web science.

Visionary Computer Scientist Becomes a Dame The Guardian, December 31, 2008ACM President Wendy Hall said of her appointment by Queen Elizabeth II that she wanted to use her new status to encourage more young people to go into computer science.